Professor Sarah Derbew (Stanford University) delivered a guest lecture on "Horizontal Reading Practices in Greek and Ethiopian Satire" on April 18.
April 18, 2025
On Friday, April 18, we welcomed Professor Sarah Derbew (Stanford University) to the Department of Classics. Professor Derbew delivered a guest lecture on "Horizontal Reading Practices in Greek and Ethiopian Satire." The abstract for the talk can be found below.
"In this talk, I employ a horizontal reading practice to analyze satirical texts from ancient Greek and modern Ethiopian literature. By putting Lucian’s (c. second century CE) “Trial of the Consonants: Sigma against Tau in the Court of the Seven Vowels” and Hama Tuma’s (1993) “The Case of the Traitorous Alphabet” into dialogue, I point out a particular type of linguistic wordplay, which I deem doublespeak, that runs through both stories. In addition to analyzing linguistic manipulations in these texts, I aim to unsettle spatiotemporal divisions between two rich literary traditions."